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Mrs. Miner came flying out. She could not recognize her husband in the bleeding, dirty, abject thing squirming under the young man’s knee.

“Why, Mr. Morris, who–why–why, it’s Tom!” she gasped, her eyes distended with surprise and horror.

Morris looked up at her coolly. “Yes, it’s Tom.” He then gave his attention to the writhing figure under him. “Crawl, you infernal whelp! Lick the dust, confound you! Quick!” he commanded, growing each moment more savage.

Mrs. Miner clung to his arm. “Please don’t,” she pleaded. “You’re killing him.”

Morris did not look up. “Oh, no, I ain’t. I’m giving him a little taste of his own medicine.” He flopped Miner over on his face and dragged him around in the dust like an old sack. “Beg her pardon, or I’ll thrash the ground with yeh!”

“Please don’t,” pleaded the wife, using her whole strength to stop him in his circuit with the almost insensible Miner.

“Beg!” he said again, “beg, or I’ll cave your backbone in.” There was a terrible upward inflection in his voice now, a half-jocular tone that was more terrible than the muffled snarl in which he had previously been speaking.

“I beg! I beg!” cried Miner.

Morris released him, and he crawled to a sitting posture. Mrs. Miner fell on her knees by his side, and began wiping the blood from his face. She was breathless with sobbing and the children were screaming. The tears streamed down her face, which was white and drawn into ghastly wrinkles.

“You’ve killed him!” she gasped.

Morris put his hands in his pockets and looked down on them both, with a curious feeling of having done something which he might repent of. He felt in a way cut off from the satisfactory ending of the thing he had planned.

“Oh, you’ve killed him!”

“Oh, no, I haven’t. He’s all right.” He looked at them a moment longer to see if there were any rage remaining in the face of the husband, and then at the wife to discover her feeling concerning his action. Then he looked back at the husband again, and apparently justified himself for what he had done by the memory of the ineffable shame to which the wife had been subjected.

“Now, if I hear another word of your abuse,” he said, as he shook the dust from his own clothes and prepared to go, “I’ll give you another that will make you think that this is all fooling. More than that,” he said, turning again, “I know something that will put you where the crows won’t eat you!–If I can be of any service to you, Mrs. Miner, at any time while I’m here, I hope you’ll let me know. Good-by.”

Mrs. Miner did not reply, and when Morris reached the gate and looked back she was still kneeling by the side of her husband, the sunlight shining down upon her graceful head. Some way the problem had increased in complexity. He felt a disgust of her weakness, mingled with a feeling that he was losing something very fine and tender which had but just come into his life.

He went back to his work on the other side of the river, where his crew was working. He was called home a few weeks later, and he never saw husband or wife again. He learned from Wilber, however, in a short letter that things were going much the same as ever.

“Dear Sir: I don’t know much about Miner. Hees purty quiet I guess. Dock Moss thinks hees a little off his nut. I don’t. I think its pur cussidness.”